Shadow Children 07 – Among the Free

Margaret Peterson Haddix's Among the Free is a tense dystopian adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who finally says no.

What happens

Luke Garner was born the third child in a country where families are only allowed two. He's spent most of his thirteen years hiding. Now he's shovelling manure as a stable boy at Population Police headquarters, keeping his head down (and missing friends whose names he doesn't dare say out loud).

Then an officer with a chest full of medals picks him out of the line-up. Luke is driven out to a poor, broken-down village to round everyone up for new identity cards.

One old woman won't go. She just sits on her couch with her knitting and calmly says no. And that's when Luke is handed a gun and told to shoot her.

This is the seventh and last of the Shadow Children books, so it helps to have met Luke before. The opening fills in enough that a new reader won't be lost, though.

You're right inside Luke's head the whole time. He argues with himself constantly, and with a friend who isn't around any more. Is he being brave or just panicking? Does anyone ever really get to choose? Those are the questions he keeps chewing over, and they're big ones.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This is a book about a government that hunts children, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. In the opening chapters an old woman is held at gunpoint, there's gunfire in the woods, and the villagers kill an officer (off the page, as Luke has already run). A child who is sensitive to violence, or to the idea of children being hunted, might find it heavy going.

The violence in these early chapters is tense rather than gory, though. A reader who is already hooked on dystopian stories will probably race through it, wondering what they'd do in Luke's shoes.

What to read next

If they'd like to go back and meet Luke's friend Trey properly, try Among the Brave, where the boy who calls himself a coward is the one who has to do the brave thing.